Monday 07 June 2010

The ULR Samurai International team put in a faultless performance in the final of the Amsterdam Sevens on Sunday, to extend their Amsterdam winning run to 6 consecutive wins.

With many new faces in the Samurai Team and a distinct lack of training time, it was always going to take the team time to gel and to get used to the structures and game plan, put in place by Samurai coaches Peter Richards and Mark Hewitt. As each pool game was played the team got better and better and the last pool game against the Nike Bowerman team, proved to be exactly what they needed.

The full size Dutch National pitch came as a big shock to the team, having played their previous games on the smaller satellite pitches. It took the Samurai team a while to get into gear before finally running out winners by 3 tries to 1.

The Sunday pool games pitched the Samurai Team against Castricum from Holland and VGA from France. Despite early resistance from both teams, the Samurai ran out comfortable winners.

With the Samurai now facing CSR Nanok in the quarter finals, (surprise winners against Wooden Spoon in the pool games) team performances were improving at a rate of knots and despite Nanok putting up a spirited fight, Samurai took the spoils to set up a re run of last year’s semi final to face the Gilbert Stoned Pups.

Samurai came out in a spirited mood which saw Gavin Dacey help himself to a well taken try after only 2 minutes ably converted by Mikey Davis. For the next couple of minutes the game went from end to end before the Pups pulled one back to level the scores. Samurai then tightened their grip on the game with a great try from Simon Hunt to help them sneak ahead. 2 more tries from Tom Wiley and again from Hunt meant, the Samurai never looked back as they reached their 6th consecutive Amsterdam 7s final.

The ULR Samurai International team now faced the much fancied Millfield Old Boys 7s team in the final. The Millfield Old Boys team included John Brake (England 7s) Miles Mantella and Tom Parker from London Irish, and Adam Clayton from Pertemps Bee’s. They had played some wonderful 7s rugby in the lead up to the final beating strong HFW Wailers and Marauders sides along the way.

The final was to be played in front of a close to capacity crowd in the Dutch National Stadium and as the whistle blew crowd favourites Millfield received the ball. Samurai pressured the Millfield team and in doing so turned the ball over in midfield. The Samurai team maintained possession and pushed forward with a fine display of 7s rugby. Despite a passionate Millfield defence, Geoff Griffiths was on hand to score a really well worked try centre field, followed by a Mikey Davis conversion.

Millfield struck back through Miles Mantella in the far left corner after some excellent work by John Brake to make the score 7 – 5 to Samurai.

Samurai Captain Carl Murray, rallied his troops and having led by example throughout the tournament his team mates immediately rose to the challenge. Samurai gained possession straight from the kick off and after further outstanding interplay between forwards and backs, Oriol Ripol went over to stretch the Samurai lead. The tone was set and in an almost faultless display of 7s rugby Samurai starved Millfield of possession, leading to 2 further outstanding tries for ‘’man of the tournament’’ Simon Hunt.

As the second half kicked off it was clear to see that Samurai had saved their best till last. Millfield were turned over time and again as the Samurai front 3 dominated the contact area. Hunt scored again to complete his treble, with further tries being scored by Murray (2) and Dacey to bring the final score to 44 – 5. It was an excellent team performance to extend the Samurai run of consecutive victories, at the Amsterdam Sevens to 6.

The next stop for the Samurai team will be the Rugby Rocks 7s in London on 12th June, where they will compete in the new UK National Sevens series. One thing is for certain, they will be hard pushed to better their final performance in Amsterdam..............